A Rich Vocation that Might Not Pay Well
How to provoke our imagination toward a bigger calling
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features David Demaree
My foot nervously tapped the brass foot rail as I waited for the man I desperately hoped would be my father-in-law. When he arrived, he barely acknowledged me as he took a seat at the bar, setting the tone for the rest of the evening. After my attempts to break the ice failed, I had no choice but to let the question fly—I asked for his blessing to marry his daughter. Clearly irritated by the request, he let the momentous question hang in the air before breaking the excruciating silence to cross-examine me about my career prospects. I was an adjunct history professor at the time and lacked what he thought was most important. My earning trajectory was, in a word, bleak. At one point I tried to pivot the conversation and broach the subject of our shared Christian faith, to which he replied, “I leave questions about character to the women.” I left the bar that evening without his blessing.
My experience is not unusual, many a beau has been foiled by their beloved’s father. It is no surprise that parents want financial security for their children, but what shocked me then and troubles me now is the primacy of money in our understanding of work and vocation. A default assumption in many corners of American Christianity is that the objective of labor is to maximize our earning potential and establish financial security. I recognize this now as a failed imagination of flourishing.
A sweeping assessment of popular Christian instruction lays bare a malformed understanding of work. On the rare occasion I hear pastors touch on the topic of work it is to praise grinding away with a cheery attitude or encourage an edgy behavior—in a Mike Pence sort of way—at their place of employment, like reading the Bible in front of co-workers. While educated Christians might scoff at the mere mention of prosperity theology, the inference that a plump salary marks God’s blessing can be heard from even the most theologically reformed pulpits. In my own experience, when Christians friends with white-collar jobs mention that someone landed a good job, good in this context means a lucrative salary. Narrowly approaching work to maximize wealth dampens the possible richness of the Christian life.
The general lack of a Christian perspective of occupation and vocation is filled by a financial catechesis grooming us to equate well-being with financial security. Foremost among these teachers is the wealth guru Dave Ramsey. Fourteen million tune into his radio show on a weekly basis to heed his directives. Ramsey, and other experts that air on Christian radio stations, shrink our thinking into a monetary vision for securing our future. Assumptions about work are informed by veneration of money.
One of the most powerful things a financial expert does is provoke their client’s imagination. The first question they often asked is, where do you want to be in five, ten, or twenty years? For too many, the extent of imagining their future flourishing begins and ends with financial planning. This spreadsheet-oriented logic can be summarized as work generates money and money is the key that unlocks the doors to a better life. Not surprisingly then the supremacy of money on our understanding of work and identity is a source of anxiety for many. I am convinced that most feel the logic of working for financial security breakdown at some point. We need something capable of nourishing the rich joy of a full imagination.
Despite this dire perspective, the faultiness of pursuing pure material gain has not gone unaddressed, to be sure. Clear-eyed warnings have emerged from the periphery of mainstream Christianity. Stanley Hauerwas bluntly pronounces, “The lure of wealth and the care of the world produced by wealth quite simply darken and choke out imaginations.” He makes clear that allegiance to the almighty dollar is at enmity with a vibrant church community. But the most chilling broadside comes from Wendell Berry’s pen. His fiery jeremiad, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” gives us a visceral picture of handing our imagination over to market capitalism. “Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made… Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer.” Berry’s damning poem drives home a hollowing effect the corporate hegemony of money can have on our life.
So how can we begin thinking about a path forward? For James K. A. Smith, we must start by diagnosing ourselves and our culture. Smith, standing on the shoulders of social theorist Charles Taylor, guides us to see how our tacit assumptions are revealed in the seemingly mundane. Our social imaginaries, according to Taylor, are the submerged, inchoate ways that we imagine the world before we ever think about it. Therefore, it is the stories and practices that form our assumptions about the good life. It is the pressure from peers to achieve an expected level of affluence, or the effects of scrolling through an acquaintance's contrived adventures on social media. These mimetic longings legitimize the assumption that we should giving our work—and even our entire self—to pursue some material version of the good life.
Uncovering our social imaginaries allows us to recognize that our thoughts, conversations, and seemingly small efforts all contribute to an internalized posture towards work. Intentionally ruminating on what it could look like to flourish according to our particular geographies, families, and obligations will open up vistas of possibility for our work.
Recently—in borrowing from the Lord’s Prayer—I have contemplated what God's kingdom on earth might look, sound, and feel like. This has led me to reflect on other questions: Can I spark glimpses of what wholeness can look like—however large or small—and give myself to that work, even if it means I don’t maximize my earning potential? Can I imagine a flourishing that is bigger than myself? As I wrestle with these questions, it is clear to me that any path forward won’t go viral, this requires a different motivation than what the marketplace imagination demands.
It has been nearly eight years since I asked my now father-in-law's blessing to marry his daughter at that bar. Unable to find a teaching position as a newlywed, I dropped out of academia and found work at a medical software company. Three kids and a mortgage later I feel the pressure to simply give all my work to the corporation that bids highest for my labor. But it is only by maintaining an imagination of flourishing that I have eyes to see that the best of my labor comes from the work I am not paid for in the place that I live among the people that I love.
David Demaree
Writer & Product Manager
David has a PhD in American history and lives with his family in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania. He works in product management at a medical software company. Despite his field of employment, he is skeptical of any boundless optimism in technology. What did you think of this essay? Share your thoughts with a comment!
Thank you for this. I have deep sympathy for men who seek to support their family and use their talents for God's kingdom in a world that opposes both. It's rough. That people are willing to pay big bucks for materialistic and soulless “content” and political gossip but not for beautiful poetry and soul-care is a travesty. People put their treasure where their heart is, and by that test, America definitely serves Mammon.
In addition to Wendell Berry, I recommend perusing Dorothy Sayers' essay “Why Work?” She writes in the wake of WWII urging people to think of work in terms of the objective goodness it produces, instead of in terms of its monetary value. She rightly insists that “Unless we do not change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon Envy and Avarice.” As writers, there's nothing we want more than to produce quality with our words. The tragedy is that the world often passes up quality work to wallow in its own filth. The system's broken. Ugh.
Although the system is broken, I hope God uses business owners and other economically influential Christians to create bright spots of reform, in the spirit of Isaiah 58, "to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke." Why else are we here than to resist the principalities of this present darkness? And this essay is part of that resistance. It looks like the Spirit has alchemized even your less-than-fulfilling job into a brick for God's kingdom.
Thank you for writing this. I think you've touched on a deep ache, in my soul at least. Somewhat ironically, part of my job as a freelance writer requires me to write blogs for a financial planner, so I have been exposed to much of the content and thinking you allude to. Most of it never goes deeper than the assumption that money and the goals it allows you to reach are good, just because (typically, buying a house, saving for retirement, etc.). And a lot of that has to do with, like you said, this grim, materialistic idea of "security."
Absent is any talk of meaning or purpose beyond self-serving ends (as much as that content might try to dress things up with the propagandistic language of "family," "the American Dream," etc.). My frustration is that of course people need access to basic living (survival) but surely there must be more than that? And even if you accept that idea has some merit, surely there must come a point at which survival/security cannot be your primary or only rationale?
That seems to me an affront towards Jesus command to, "Seek first the Kingdom and righteousness, and everything else will be added to you as well." It seems we have got it backwards: start with security/survival, then maybe worry about a greater purpose later. I'm sorry, but it sounds more like we're sitting at the feet of Rabbi Maslow than Rabbi Jesus at that point (or Rabbi Ramsey, for that matter).
And let me be clear: I don't think any one individual is to blame for that, either. Where is the teaching in that vacuum on how to do what Jesus asks us to? The teaching that emphasises serving others, caring for the poor, finding meaning in the other-oriented Gospel of the Kingdom? And, more importantly, where is that teaching in a contextualized sense? Contextualized to the workplace, I mean.
If the best we can offer is, "Silently read your Bible in a quasi-public space." Then our culture is doomed. Faithful Christians will either replace Jesus with the false god of security or they will (wrongly) assume that the only way to fill the ache in their soul is to enter "full-time ministry" (another phrase that makes me feel ill).
As I have thought, prayed and wrestled with this tension, I have found that the only way out for me is to listen daily, weekly, monthly to the still, small voice of the Father, revealed in Jesus, by the Spirit, for direction and guidance. The hints and whispers that come from those times have led to a very different life than I expected when I left university.
All of which is to say: thank you for writing this and sharing it here. I appreciate you speaking into the void, especially from a fellow Pittsburgh-adjacent resident! (My wife and I live on the other side of the city).
And as an aside, one book that has opened my eyes to the cognitive dissonance between Western Christianity and the Gospel of the Kingdom is Douglas Meeks' "God the Economist." If you haven't read it, I highly, highly recommend it.